The first line said Notice to Quit Possession. The second line said the first of the month. The third line held the word I had only heard on television, eviction. It had been recorded by Pamela Whitcombe against Joyce Amenta, tenant, for unpaid rent of seven thousand two hundred dollars. Eighteen months at four hundred a month. I had been in that house for a year and a half, true, but the lease I signed was only a month old. They had backdated the debt. They meant to put me on the sidewalk on the first, and then tell the world I had never paid for a thing.
I sat on a bench outside the town clerk office with my handbag on my knees, and I did what I had done for forty two years in claims. I read the paper again, slowly, for the fact that did not fit. The fact was the date. Pamela bought the house in the same week that I wrote my check. My ninety thousand dollars had gone to the closing attorney, Granger and Pratt, on Asylum Street. I took the number 60 bus back to the bank. The same teller who had asked me twice was working. “Mrs. Amenta,” she said, “I kept the copy.”
She brought out the image of my cashier check. On the memo line, in my own hand, I had written, Down payment for Dominic and Lauren, my room for life. Then she printed the gift letter that I had signed for the bank. It said the donor understood that the buyers, Dominic and Lauren, would own and occupy the home. I took both pages to a woman named Ms. Ferreira at Greater Hartford Legal Aid, a young attorney with ink on her cuff and a calm way of listening. She read everything twice, and then she smiled, not unkindly, the way a cat smiles.
A recorded notice and a saved bank check sent a landlady in disguise to legal aid, and an eviction turned into a house sale and a home of her own.
“Mrs. Amenta,” she said, “your son and his wife told the lender they would own this house. The deed says Pamela Whitcombe does. Somebody told the bank one thing and the town another. That is a serious problem for them, and a very useful one for you.” She wrote letters that afternoon. One went to Pamela, one to Granger and Pratt, one to the mortgage company. Each said, in polite sentences, that my money had been given on a stated understanding, that the understanding was false, and that I was prepared to explain it to whoever wished to hear.
The first of the month came on a Monday. I had packed one suitcase and put it on the porch. At nine in the morning a car pulled up, and Pamela Whitcombe got out in a pink suit, with a man from the office of the sheriff behind her. Ms. Ferreira got out of the other side of a small gray Honda, with a folder. “Mrs. Whitcombe,” she said pleasantly, “before anyone touches a door, you might want to read what the mortgage company wrote this morning.” Pamela read it on my front walk. The pink drained out of her face. “Janice,” she said weakly, and then, “I mean Joyce.”
Before the sale closed, Lauren came to my room one evening, without her pink nails and without her phone, and sat on the edge of my bed. She said she had been afraid since the first week that Dominic would leave if the house did not look rich. She said her mother had made the plan and she had gone along because it was easier than arguing. I said I knew about being afraid. I also said understanding was not the same as paying. She nodded and put the room lease in my hand, and I tore it down the middle and let both halves fall into the wastebasket.
Inside, at the kitchen island where the lease had been slid over to me, we sat down like a board meeting. Lauren cried and called me babe. Dominic stared at the maple outside the window as if it might offer him a way out. Ms. Ferreira laid out the choices. Pamela could face the lender. Or she could sell the house within sixty days, repay my ninety thousand with interest from the proceeds, and withdraw the notice in writing. Pamela chose the second so fast her bracelets rattled. Lauren said it was not fair. Ms. Ferreira said fair was exactly what we were attempting.
The red door colonial sold in six weeks to a couple with twin boys. I received a check from the title company for ninety nine thousand, four hundred dollars, and I held it a long time before I put it in my handbag. Then I took a taxi to look at a little ranch condominium near Elizabeth Park, on the first floor, with a kitchen window that faced an old maple. The woman showing it said, “It feels like somebody is already happy here.” I said I would take it and she asked whether I wanted time to think. I told her I had done my thinking in 1979.
Dominic came to see me in March, alone. He stood in my new doorway holding a bakery box of cannoli, the same kind he brought the day he first asked me for money, and for once he did not smile. His marriage had ended in January. He had a job at a car dealership in Newington and a rented room that smelled like old pizza. “Ma, I did a terrible thing,” he said. “Yes,” I said. “You did.” I let him stand there a moment longer than was comfortable. Then I stepped aside, and he came in, and he cried at my table like a boy.
I have a spare room now, with its own window. Dominic lives in it. I wrote the paper myself on a yellow pad, four hundred dollars a month, utilities shared fairly, thirty days notice from either party. He signed it in front of me and kissed my cheek. The lease is stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a lemon. On Sundays he rolls the meatballs while I stir the gravy, and when his friends visit he introduces me properly, to the whole room, as his mother, the landlady, and the best cook in Hartford.